Frozen body of mountaineer discovered 32 years after death on Mont Blanc

The body of trainee guide Patrice Hyvert who went missing in 1982, aged 23, has been found by two mountain-climbers.

His father, Gérard, gave up hope after days of rescue searches and mourned his son’s loss. But the chance discovery of Hyvert’s body last Thursday on the Talèfre glacier at an altitude of 2,600 metres, 32 years after he was reported missing, means his family will have to grieve all over again.”We were alerted by a climber that he had found a body on the glacier,” Captain Patrick Ribes of the Chamonix gendarmerie rescue service told the Guardian. He sent two gendarmes to the glacier where Hyvert’s frozen body was lying on the surface. “We identified him straight away,” said Ribes. “He still had his ID papers on him, and all his equipment, including his skis.”

Gérard Hyvert, now 82, described it as a body blow like a “second death” when two gendarmes and an official from the local mayor’s office came to his door with the news that his son’s body had been found.

“I can’t say that it came as a relief. I would have preferred him to have stayed up there,” he told Le Parisien newspaper. Hyvert, who alerted rescue services to the fact that his son had gone missing, had presumed he was “under a rock” somewhere on the mountain face.

Patrice Hyvert’s father presumes his son reached the summit of Nant Blanc despite the bad weather, and had decided to return down the other side, on the Whymper corridor.

His father said: “Mountains were his passion. I thought I would be dead before they found him.”